Return of the Native (Illustrated)

"The Return of the Native is a great, super melodramatic Thomas Hardy novel . His earlier novels were criticized for being either too boring or too sensational, and he tried to strike a happy medium with this one. He wrote a five-act tragedy about a tiny village in England and submitted it to various publishers, most of whom rejected it, which may be a familiar experience for any writer. He ends up placing the novel at Belgravia, which is a middle-brow magazine. They won’t publish a tragedy, so they make him add a sixth act that ends happily. A little bonus is that in any contemporary edition you’ll find, at the end of the fifth act, Hardy notes that there are two possible endings for the book, and that “those with an austere artistic code can assume the more consistent conclusion to be the true one.” This might be paraphrased as ‘this book should be sad.’ It’s a classic Hardy novel, full of landscape and striving people and romance, and it’s really beautiful. This one is illustrated by Clare Leighton, one of the great illustrators of the Arts and Crafts movement of the early 20th century. She loved moody, tiny, black-and-white images, and she was already obsessed with Thomas Hardy when she was a young student. It was quite early on in her career when she received this commission, and she took it very seriously. Almost immediately, she quit her teaching duties and moved to Dorset, which is where Hardy was from and where he wrote this novel. There, she spent at least a year walking around, doing incredibly detailed images of the landscape, and finding a way to take what she was seeing in front of her (England in 1928 and 1929) and trying to imagine it in the 19th century, minus the tractors and the sense of loss after World War One. She had lost her brother Roland Leighton during World War One (his fiancee Vera Brittain later wrote Testament of Youth about their romance). In Clare Leighton’s pictures, you get this really beautiful combination of loss and imagination and nostalgia. “She scatters Dorset throughout the book, and it feels so true to what it is to read Hardy” There’s a real sense that the book is an invitation into Dorset. The binding is the color of straw, and the boards are sky blue. Maybe some of us will get to go to Dorset and walk around and have the feeling of seeing what Thomas Hardy saw, or imagine that we’re seeing some of it, but she is inviting everyone to have that experience and to get a little lost in the landscape, the way that Hardy allows you to do when you’re reading. That’s what I like about her work. A professor in college told me that when you’re reading most books, you think about the pages that you’ve dog-eared—the pages you’ve specifically noticed where real action is happening. He said that with Hardy, you should be looking at the pages you don’t dog-ear, because so much of him lives in the descriptions of landscape. Leighton does tiny descriptions of these bits of landscape. She does dozens and dozens of them, and each one is just a strip of a branch or one trunk or one little reflecting pool. She scatters Dorset throughout the book, and it feels so true to what it is to read Hardy."